Ezekiel Chapter 8
If you have spent much time around our home, you know that the word quiet is not one of the many adjectives a person would normally use to describe it. But this particular evening is one of rare quiet, like an Oklahoma day with only a gentle breeze just sort of stirring the air around. We don’t get many of those. So, after dinner and after-dinner-clean-up I made a fire in the fireplace and sat down to write with two dogs at my feet and nary a soul in the room. Rare.
I’m not sure what it is about fire in the fireplace that delights me so much. A kind soul (one of the many who have come into our home) gave me a lovely word: hygge (pronounced hoo-gah), it’s a Danish word for a cozy contented conviviality that makes you feel at home. Think fireplaces and candles and socked feet and hot coco and ambient music all is right with the world. Now that I sit and think about it, I probably spend a lot of my life trying to create hygge, working to create space where people can rush in from the insane bustle of American Crazy Life and toss off their shoes in a pile in the entry way and collapse in on the couch and converse to the crackling applause of hardwood turning into coals.
But coals are beautiful only when they stay in their lane. Take them out of the fireplace and put them on the rug and we quickly convert hygge into a hellscape. Fire has a place. A fireplace. That’s where the fire goes. Take it out of its place and it can burn the whole house down. It’s a metaphor I use with our kids explaining the power of sexual intimacy. Keep it in the fireplace of marriage and it’s beautiful. Take it out and you can get Epstein and Diddy. At best, you get the charred, broken remnant of a marriage, a family stumbling through the ebony smoldering echo of all that remains of home after the unimpeded flames of passion have devoured everything good and holy. Keep that fire in the fireplace, people. It isn’t worth it. Sin isn’t worth it. But oh, how quickly we can be deceived.
Eziekiel had the beautiful burden of seeing both God’s glory and man’s sin in contrast. In chapter 8 (which happened in September of 592 BC, less than 6 years before the final destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586), he is sitting at his home in exile in Babylon with some elders of Judah. I like to think they have just finished dinner, still picking at tasty morsels, when Ezekiel is lifted by the hand of God to witness the heat-bright glory of the living God and then immediately transported to the temple in Jerusalem. Did God physically phase Ezekiel through space-time? That would be cool, right? Or did He just give him a vision? I’m not sure, I lean a bit toward the former, and it’s not without Biblical precedent, and Ezekiel is a wildly fantastical book, but I digress.
He sees the north gate of the inner court of the temple complex and there is something only described as the idol of jealousy. An idol that provoked God’s jealousy.
This is a constant theme in Scripture. God as a jealous husband, jealous for the purity and wholeness and shalom of His bride. Jealous not because God got His feelings hurt or His pride dented, but because He loves His people with a steadfast love, a love that protects, that wants what is best for His beloved, what helps His beloved thrive. Holy love gets jealous when the beloved sins. And Ezekiel was about to take an Ebeneezer Scrooge level tour of sin.
He sees an idol, most likely an Asherah pole, a symbol of a Canaanite fertility goddess, at the entrance to the house of the Lord. God calls it a great abomination. We don’t use that word much anymore, abomination. It’s not just something bad, or even something terrible, it is something that violates the created order. That twists and distorts what is meant to be good and holy and turns it into something destructive and defiling. It is moral vandalism in the highest order that rends the very moral fabric of creation. Israel had built an altar to a Canaanite god on the front porch of the Dwelling place of the Most High God. It was the public, structural, corporate disordering of all that is good. And it gets worse.
Ezekiel then sees a hole in the wall of the temple court and God has him dig a bigger hole so he can crawl inside. Once there, he sees the leaders of Israel, the seventy elders, acting like priests with incense censers in hand, leading worship before a pantheon of idols; creepy things, unclean beasts, like they were back in Egypt worshipping frogs, enslaved to the lies of the lord of the flies. And God asks Ezekiel a question, “Do you see what the elders of the house of Israel are committing in the dark? They say, the Lord does not see us…” Oh, what a perversion! What a breaking of what is true and right. God is El Roi the God who Sees! These men were supposed to be leading the people to God, and instead they were enslaved in the dark of their sin. Yet greater abominations are coming.
The Lord brings Ezekiel back to the gate of the Temple where a group of women were worshipping Tammuz, a Sumerian-Babylonian god, a shepherd-king, who died in the heat of summer as the vegetation withered under the relentless Near Eastern sun. They worshipped by grieving his death until the autumn rains, represented by their tears, would bring him back to life. They had turned from the living God to a made-up deity that couldn’t take the heat and needed a bunch of ladies to cry for him every July. But the worst is coming.
Between the porch and the altar, in the place where only priests could go were 25 men, “with their backs to the temple of the LORD and their faces toward the east, prostrating themselves eastward toward the sun.” The very men who were supposed to be shepherding and protecting the people from the lies of the world and the tricks of the devil, these men had turned their backs on Yahweh and worshipped the sun. Turned their backs on the God who made the sun so they could worship a ball of fire in the sky. Abomination. Twisted. Their faces pointed away from the God who could save them and bowed down toward the judgement God was bringing. It is so catastrophically broken. To Ezekiel, God asks one question, “Do you see this, son of man?”
Oh, this chapter tears the very heart out of me! While I don’t have idols set up in the foyer of the church, what would you see if you could crawl through the walls of my heart? What creepy-crawly things are lurking there in the shadows? Do I ever turn my back on the Lord and hope in something else? Why do I get all bothered when the news is bad? Is it because my hope is in a better world instead of a Glorious God? What coals have fallen out of the fireplace and are smoldering on the floor of my heart? Ezekiel, poor Ezekiel, got to stare into the supernova Glory of the Living God and then contrast that with witnessing God’s beloved chosen covenant children turn their backs on their Redeemer and curse Him in the dark. They got there by degrees. Little by little. I can too. And it terrifies me.
Sin is subtle. At first. Just an ember on the rug. But it doesn’t stay that way. Sin smolders while we sleep and fills our homes with toxic plumes that lull us into slumber and rob us of the breath of life. The wages of sin is death. And Ezekiel awakens in me a hatred of sin. A loathing: like how I say the word cancer through clenched teeth because I watched it take my Dad away. Ezekiel alerts me to the subtle whispers of the evil one, to the gentle nudging of the world, to the winking invitations of my flesh, and I hear Paul in my heart imploring me, “consider yourselves dead to sin but alive in Christ Jesus” and I remember that my Redeemer lives and He lives within my heart and He extinguishes those subtle embers and sits with me by the fireplace and tells me tales of glory and grace. When He is there, I hate sin and love Him and in that love is peace. And that is the quiet I truly need.
